2009-02-20

These instructions are for programming a Yamaha RX-V361 AV receiver remote control so it can control a Panasonic TV:

Press and hold the DTV/CBL input button on the remote

While still holding that button press and hold the AV POWER button for about 3 seconds – long enough for the DTV/CBL message to go away and the sound setting to be displayed (e.g. Music Enh. 2ch). If you don’t hold it down long enough it will say “RemoteSetup NG”. In that case, try again. If you are successful it will just display the sound setting.

Enter the four-digit code using the green numeric buttons at the bottom of the remote. The code for the TV is found in the back of the AV receiver manual, which can be found online. After the fourth button is pressed the display should say “RemoteSetup OK”. The first number listed for Panasonic worked for me for an old CRT TV.

The TV POWER button on the Yamaha remote should now turn on/off the TV (provided the standby button on the TV is already depressed). Other buttons should also work, e.g. TV INPUT, TV MUTE, TV CH, TV VOL, etc.

Key points that are not made clear in the manual: you must use the DTV/CBL input when programming the remote to control a TV (you don’t need to have this input selected to control the TV once it is programmed though); the RemoteSetup NG/OK/display stuff as outlined above.

This took me a while to get right the first time, and I neglected to write it down. Hopefully this will help someone out.

2009-02-05

My N800 was running off-line for quite a while. During this time I’d listened to a bunch of songs with Kagu and was hoping that it would immediately scrobble them to last.fm as soon as I went online. After much fiddling around, I discovered that you must play another song in Kagu while online, in order to launch scrobblerd (via dbus). This, in turn, submits all the tracks queued for scrobbling while offline via maemoscrobbler.